I had the chance to facilitate a discussion on Education Futures with Interactive Ontario, here’s what we discussed:

The world is changing rapidly and everybody needs to learn. Education is expensive and it should be free for general prosperity and for students and organizations to be more successful. This scaffolds up to a societal level.We live in a digital economy speared by tech, which is driving change; and students and professionals need to adapt in a lifelong learning process.

It’s the economy stupid:

We’re approaching the democratization of education. In the MIT example, we reach a much wider audience– and this increases accessibility to skills & professional development. We’re creating a different accessibility problem, because even though tech is more accessible in people’s hands, the true costs are deferred / obscured. Education remains a commodity that’s not within everyones reach, & the opportunity cost of not trying to democratize it creates a 2 tier society of the informed and uniformed– barriers worth breaking. Every culture has their own perspective on learning success and goals, and their approaches to teaching are different. Opening up standardized technologies help these gaps.